Seminar: Data Poetics (2014)
Poems About The World
Sophie Fischer
Nowadays headlines like «Nelson Mandela died», «Nearly 4 Dozen People Killed in Iraq Attacks» or «Justin Bieber doesn’t like Swag anymore» are all over the Internet. We‘re facing hundreds of them on a daily basis. They tell us what’s going on all around the world. But above all they describe the world, in which we live in.
«Poems about the World» is a programme that creates poems using the recent news from all over the world. Developed with Processing, the code loads the recent headlines of the most common newspapers, like The Times, The Guardian, and many more into a database. Comparing the last word of the headlines it generates rhymes and arranges the headlines in the typical structure of a poem. The process can be shown on an electronic paper, which reminds of a daily tear-off calendar.
Since January 1 2014 I started to let the programme create a poem for every day, in order to produce a poetic almnanac of 2014 out of the world's news. With every headline, whether they’re right or wrong, the story of our world gets written.
